To fly is to forfeit identity. What boards the plane is not what leaves it. In the sky, the self disintegrates. The body persists, but the soul enters eclipse.

I have never flown without feeling that I am dying. Not metaphorically, not poetically, but in some raw and actual sense. As the engines begin their low incantation, as the nose of the aircraft begins its long ascent, something in me loosens. Not fear. Not awe. Something stranger. Something colder and more familiar than either.

You sit in the dim hush of the cabin, surrounded by strangers embalmed in half-sleep. The stale air vibrates with the low drone of engines, the chant of a godless priesthood. All rituals begin with noise. This one begins with the sound of becoming machine.

The ascent is violent, sublime. The ground withdraws like a guilty thought. The world vanishes beneath a veil of smoke and distance. Nothing is close. Nothing is yours. Your name loosens. Your memories blur. You are no one. You are saved.

I used to press my forehead to the glass as a child, watching the wings shiver as if they were alive. I believed the sky was another world and the clouds were beasts we passed through. I still believe it. The body may adapt to flying, but the soul never does. It flees ahead or lags behind.

High above the world, among shattered clouds and the metallic breath of oxygen vents, you glimpse the truth. Death is not an event, but a state. Here, it arrives without spectacle. It is smooth, dry, institutional. Death as comfort. Death as silence that hums.

And yet, this death carries no curse. It is the necessary price for a minor miracle. For what returns to earth is something else. A self that has crossed through absence. A self shaken loose of its own weight.

Each flight is a rehearsal. A liturgy for the inevitable. The airplane becomes a floating tomb, and you are both corpse and witness. There are no windows in the underworld, only portals. Each one opens onto a cloudless infinity where time has no meaning and consequence no shape.

Outside, the sun dilates across the wing. Its light pours like molten gold onto the curves of the engine, serene and cruel. The clouds glow with the pallor of forgotten gods. The horizon bends gently like a blade of copper. You stare into it and feel the vertigo of eternity. It is beautiful. It is unbearable.

The stewardess smiles, absurd in her kindness. Her hands offer water, coffee, sugar. She is a midwife for the in-between. A custodian of ghosts.

In the womb of altitude, things decompose. Memory, meaning, desire. What remains is the thinnest wire of awareness stretched between two voids. A thread of breath suspended in the stillness between departure and arrival.

To live is to leave. Again and again. The child leaves the mother. The thought leaves the mind. The passenger leaves the city. Nothing holds. Everything escapes.

Anaximander said that from the indefinite comes all birth, and into it all things return. Flight obeys this law. It is the apeiron in motion, the boundless given shape, then taken away. Heraclitus burns behind the engine’s growl, whispering that the road up and the road down are one and the same. What begins in fire ends in fire. Even here, in this chamber of sky, the flames are cold.

Once, midflight over the Atlantic, I awoke from a dream in which I was walking across water, barefoot and laughing. The aisle lights had dimmed. The passengers were shadows. The engines pulsed like enormous lungs. I thought: this is the closest I have ever come to God. Not in a cathedral. Not in a moment of joy. But here, suspended, emptied, breathless. A speck in the vast scream of silence.

The air thins. Sleep comes like a ritual anesthetic. Dreams flutter behind your eyelids like insects in a jar. You dream of rivers reversing, of cities falling upward, of doors that open into sky. You are not awake. You are not asleep. You are passing through the veil.

Yet flight does not despair. It exults. It accepts the law of loss and finds in it a strange joy. What is fragile is holy. What perishes, reveals.

The earth returns with a murmur. The cabin lights flare. The plane dips. There is always pain in reincarnation. A jolt, a weight, a name you must wear again.

You leave the plane. The body moves. The world surrounds. You are reborn, indistinguishable from the one who boarded, and yet not the same. Not entirely. Something within you has died, perhaps a delusion. Perhaps a burden.

This is not transcendence. This is transformation at its most brutal and honest. A daily apocalypse wrapped in aluminum and schedule.

In flight, we mimic the gods and the dead. We become both.

There is no greater peace than to vanish midair, to dissolve in a pressurized silence, and to return without explanation.

This is what flying offers, not speed, not distance, but the exquisite terror of becoming something new.

We die into the sky. And live again, without knowing how.